Reclaiming the Southwest: A Traumatic Space in the Japanese American Internment Narrative‪.‬

More than a spatial category or a topographical term, the U.S. Southwest identifies a region geographically vast, cartographically elusive, and culturally heterogeneous. Though a familiar term to the American mind, the Southwest is a place of shifting boundaries; in the early nineteenth century it referred to the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee (the Old Southwest). (1) Later, the term's inclusive area shifted westward, to refer to Missouri, Oklahoma, and central Texas. In the twentieth century, it emerged as a territory specifically located in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah or, in a much broader sense, spreading across the states from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean to include Nevada, Colorado, Oklahoma, California, and Texas as well. This inconclusive mapping reflects the Southwest as not only a physical but a figurative reality, a site for the clash of political and cultural ideologies. In fact, shaped by the cultures of many distinct peoples, the "Southwest," an ethnocentric term, evokes questions--south of what? And west of what? The contemporary Southwest is a north to Hispanic Americans as a lost homeland; a west to Anglo-Americans as a refuge free of schedules and materialistic, hierarchical lifestyles; and a spiritual and sacred center to Native Americans. They all--Anglo, Hispanic, and Native Americans-chart different relationships to the land and attribute various or even contradictory traits to the identity of the Southwest. Today, this ideologically charged region is populated by "Southwesterners" who include tourists, visitors, immigrants, retirees, miners, conservationists, cowboys, and others. The meaning, if not the geography, of the Southwest continues to evolve. Though constantly invented, reinvented, and open to negotiation, the Southwest has a core barely remarked--it was once a site for internment camps. During World War II, approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, uprooted from their homes and communities, were incarcerated in one of fifteen "assembly centers" or ten "relocation centers," situated mainly in dusty and desolate areas of the West or the Southwest. Unlike other Southwesterners, whose relationships with one another are interwoven and figured spatially, the internees, confined in isolated prison camps, could not encounter ordinary residents of the Southwest and, moreover, their relationship to the land was asymmetrical to that of residents there. Further, Southwestern American literature does not recognize the Japanese American internment narrative as a part of its discourse, and Japanese American writers barely relate their identity to the imagined or literal space of the Southwest. This lack of acknowledgment of the internment has several consequences. First, it leaves incompletely represented the multicultural richness of the American Southwest as a region. Second, the loss of local topographical knowledge about internment camps in the Southwest reduces our memory of an event very traumatic in American history but essentially missing from mainstream American consciousness. Third, the failure of Japanese Americans to recognize the Southwest orients their identity merely to temporal quality and de-spatializes their traumatic experiences. Because, as some scholars maintain, "place is our ontological origin" and "our primordial experiences are more related to place than to time" (Dainotto 1; Kort 168), Japanese Americans must reclaim the Southwest not only because internment camps once were located in it, but also because of the traumatic action performed Japanese it. Because people and places are mutually constitutive, Japanese Americans must also recognize their identity in terms of spatiality and carve that identity back into the topography of the Southwest.